Teaching
Courses
For me, teaching is an opportunity to co-learn with students. A benefit of working at a small liberal arts college is that I get to teach widely, from bioethics to logic and from philosophy of race to cognitive science. Below are courses I have taught at University of Puget Sound.
Introduction to Philosophy
Language, Knowledge, and Power
My intro-level teaching goal is to show students the utility of philosophical tools and concepts for understanding the world. In this course, students learn about the sociopolitical significance of language and knowledge, and use tools and concepts introduced to understand contemporary and historical injustices around the globe. While it may not be the conventional introduction to philosophy, I have argued that this course is still an introduction to philosophy. In addition, I have also outlined the pedagogical considerations behind its design.
Basics of Bioethics
I love teaching bioethics because of it is so clearly relevant to the real world. As such, I change the content significantly from semester to semester to bring in current issues. The most recent iteration of the course is centered on the body, including topics such as adolescent access to puberty blockers and medicine’s perception of fatness.
Moral Philosophy
I teach it comparatively, including Kongzi, Mengzi, and Mozi as well as Aristotle, Kant, and Mill.
Formal Logic
My course runs on forall x: Calgary and carnap.io.
Classical Chinese Philosophy
My course introduces students to central texts in early Chinese thought: Lunyu, Daodejing, Mozi, Zhuangzi, Mengzi, Xunzi, and Han Feizi. Primarily, I want students develop skills for making historically-informed interpretations of these texts. Secondarily, I want students to consider these texts' relevance to practical and philosophical discourses today.
Race and Philosophy
I focus on racism before race in this course. I start with a variety of racisms beyond black-and-white, and in both Western and Sinosphere contexts. Then, I introduce different philosophical accounts of race so that students can consider how well (or not) these accounts handle the diversity of racisms in different contexts. Finally, students get to draw connections between race and other topics such as: sex, art, and appropriation; medicine and technology; education and crime.
Philosophy of Cognitive Science
I think of cognitive science as the interdisciplinary study of the mind. My course approaches the foundational methodological questions through a broadly historical overview of the development of cognitive science: from classical representationalist responses to behaviorism to contemporary anti-representationalist approaches—with a special focus on embodied, embedded, enactive, and extended cognition.
Philosophy of Language
Topics in Knowledge and Reality: Philosophical Methods
This course for graduating philosophy majors is supposedly about philosophical methods. But that is just so that students can do the project they want to do, with a variety of philosophical methods. The ethos of the course is do-it-together, exemplified by my own attempt to write a new paper as students write theirs, so that they can grasp the necessity of having many terrible ideas and writing many terrible drafts.
Independent Research
In 2019, I advised Samantha Lilly on their honors thesis “Epistemic Injustice and Suicidality”, which grew from their work in the philosophical methods seminar. In 2021, I advised Hannah Stockton on her summer research project “The Role of Thought in Enactivism”. I am open to work with all students, but I am best able to advise students who have had significant interactions with me in classes or whose project significantly overlaps with my own current research interests.